Open Letter to President Elect Obama

Dear President Elect Obama,

Congratulations on winning the election. I will be proud to call you my president. There are many things you will be asked to do and for many good reasons by many good people. I would like to add my request to that list.

The situation in the Guantanamo Bay Prison increasingly worries me. I encourage you to keep your campaign promise to get those prisoners trials here in our court system. Recently I heard a news commentator speaking of the fear of some people in the government have about the torture stories that will come out should you allow these people to have their due process under the law. Those tales of torture have become the proverbial elephant in the room. Most of the world is aware of what is going on there, but no one has thus far been willing to acknowledge it.

If we are to heal the rifts in our nation and the rifts between us and the rest of the world, we need to be honest with ourselves and everyone else. We need to acknowledge whatever wrongs have been done to our fellow humans imprisoned in Guantanamo. We need to apologize to those people, their families, and their nations of origin. We need to apologize as a nation.

It does not matter who voiced the orders or who looked away when wrong was being done when we make our apology. (The particular people responsible for unethical decisions ought also to be dealt with but that is not what this letter is about.) We who have had the right to vote into office our elected officials who then hired the rest of the government employees are all to blame. It does not matter if you voted for the administrators directly involved or not. We are a republic with democratically elected people in power. Most of us decided to put them there and that is all that matters.

I am guessing that some of those people truly are criminals that ought to be imprisoned somewhere, but they are also people who deserve the rights we as a nation set forth in our Constitution. To me, it does not matter if a person is a citizen of the U.S. or not. If you are a person, you have certain inalienable rights that we of all nations should respect. One of those rights is the right to a fair and speedy trial. Those souls we have imprisoned in Guantanamo and possibly in other locations have yet to be granted that right. I am holding out hope that you will do all in your power to change that situation.

Sincerely,
Meghan Hamilton